I see kickstarter mostly as buying time for pbird to work on it full time, much like you donate to an open source project. Big difference is however that with kickstarter you get the money beforehand, or at least you know it will be there

for "simple" things that are either drawing by hand, or pure models one could see GPL as viable, but once you get into manually retouching automatically generated (i.e. from 3D models), the whole GPL "source" definition becomes murky

my worst impression is that once you learn how to place the industry chain, all your game will be the same, because you need to save time and avoid to deplete the resources by reasoning on how to place things

that the same on TT, but there is time-related, you finish to build a mainline and you need to upgrade it to concrete-sleepers-with-streamlined-catenary-poles-and-good-looking-stations because you fast forwarded of about 150 years

I would have expected a clear license-statement along the lines of at least what V does with rawr (all sprites and code GPL licensed) instead of some talk about 'always did' and 'would give permission to someone if I were not around'

I don't think a licence which requires sources is a sensible one for artwork, but if planetmaker/OpenTTD wants to take the pineapple base set and publish it under the GPL (and to consider the sprites alone as source) he's welcome to.

GPL defined the source as "the preferred form of the work for making modifications". For rendered 3D sprites, this does imply somewhat that the models are the source, not the rendered image. After all, if you want to add a window to a train model, you'd usually modify the model and re-render, instead of manually editing all the different rendered views and zooms.

textures and models are separate already, cant split those two things really any further :P it always will be 2 different files. Anyway, my point is that a 3D model (textured or not), is something that their authors might use in the future in commercial projects

And if you are worried about piracy, how is it any different to person 1 buying it and then making a torrent out of it? The availability or non-availability of an open source license doesn't change that one bit.

3D models are not easily exchanged between different programmes. And knowledge with those programmes is much rarer than pixel pushing. Thus the likelyhood that someone with the skills in those textures comes along is smaller than with sprites. But it doesn't make it less valuable to have them

thus for any continuity in the project OpenTTD as a whole, in order to evolve, it's essential that the stuff it relies on is open source. And that includes the models for the game content if you are interested in this game to stay around and keep up with technical development

andythenorth: Depends on what you consider a credit card. If you think of an US-style revolving credit card, you'll be hard pressed to find a German with one. Credit card branded debit cards are used in Germany, but definitely not to the extend of many other countries.